Saturday, October 29, 2011

A Fun Cool Way to Learn New Vocabulary!

Miscellaneous - a random groups of objects

We just had our second annual Vocabulary Costume Parade! It was so much fun and a FABULOUS learning experience! All the fourth grade teachers start off start off by reading Miss Alaineus A Vocabulary Disaster by Debra Fraiser. Then we assign the students a vocabulary word and send home a letter to the parents explaining that their child has been assigned an at home project where they need to create a costume that describes the meaning of their vocabulary word. We encourage the families to be creative and use things they already have to create their costumes. We set a due date and then have a vocabulary costume parade for the rest of the school! When the parade ends 4th grade meets together and has a word scavenger hunt. Some examples of what is on the scavenger word hunt list.... find a word that means keenly watchful to detect danger; ever awake and alert (answer: vigilant) or find to adverbs, etc. Above you can see me as "Miss Alaineous" one of the characters from the book. Our students were sooooooooo creative and really learned a lot of new vocabulary words this activity! I really recommend doing this activity whether you do it as a class, grade level or school!
Here are some some pics of some of our best costumes.

awkward

humble

zany

generosity

rickety useless vigilant energetic essential

I hope this inspires you to do have your own Vocabulary Parade! For more ideas visit Debra Fraiser's page

What a great idea! My district's push this year has been vocabulary so this would be a fun way for the students to show that they understand what the vocabulary words mean. Thank you so much for sharing!!!

This is Great! Thanks for sharing. I do have one question...Can you tell me a little more about the words scavenger hunt the fourth graders have afterwards? Are they looking in dictionaries or are they looking for objects around campus? Where do these extra words come from?THank you, Amy from Tucsonagosla@amphi.com

Great question Amy. The scavenger hunt is really students answering questions about vocabulary words that have been assigned to other students. They find the answers by looking at the other costumes. Each question is worth a certain amount of points... I put some pics of the types of questions we ask on the hunt on my facebook page if you want to check them out.

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